years he had been preaching the living gospel in Rio Verde, and despite the presence of established churches, he had found a following and formed a congregation. Donations had allowed him to eventually move out of his original storefront and purchase the old Presbyterian church when that denomination had constructed a new and bigger building on the east end of town. He had continued expanding his flock, making no concessions to modernity, refusing to follow the example of the chain churches and compromise the words of the Lord with secular notions of tolerance. '
.... And now Jesus had rewarded him. :
Wheeler turned away from the window. He knew what he had to do. The path for him had been illuminated, and he had been given detailed instructions. He would obtain a loan, sell this house, take up a collection, do everything he could and anything he had to to pay for the building of the new church. He would have meetings in the vacant lot next to the Dairy Queen, like he did in the old tent days in Phoenix.
The Lord's will would be done.
Shadows shrunk as the sun rose in the east and the desert dawn gained strength. Wheeler continued to stare out the window. The adrenaline within him was still high, but the fear and excitement he had experienced only a few moments before had metamorphosed into something like the peace he had felt when he had been with Jesus. He felt strangely calm. He would have expected to feel tense, pressured, as though the weight of the world had just been placed on his shoulders.
He had met and spoken with Jesus Christ, had been instructed to build a magnificent temple of the Lord, had been asked to participate in the biggest event in the history of modern Christianity, yet he felt oddly disassociated from it all, as though he were watching it happen to someone else.
He smiled as he looked out over the shabby town. Here he was, in this small house in this nondescript desert community, and he alone knew the solution to a question that not even the world's greatest theologians could have answered. It was not an important question, not anything earth-shattering, but somehow it made him feel better than everything else he had learned during the night.
Black.
Jesus' favorite color was black.
Sue Wing tried to be as unobtrusive as possible as she stood behind the restaurant's cash register, folding the newly printed take-out menus.
Behind her, in the kitchen, she heard her parents atgxting loudly in Cantonese, her mother insisting that the air conditioner be set at eighty degrees in order to save money, her father stating that he was going to leave it at seventy so their customers would be comfortable.
Underneath the arguing, from farther back in the kitchen, she heard the tinkly, dissonant sounds of her grandmother's music, faint but appropriate, like a soundtrack to her parents' heated discussion.
Sue picked up another menu, matching the edges and creasing the fold.
She glanced over the top of the register at the restaurant's lone customers, two yuppies who had obviously stopped in town on their way to the lake or the dude ranch. Both of them had short brownish hair, the man's a little shorter than the woman's, and both wore expensive clothes of studied casualness, fashion statements that were supposed to show that they were at once hip and weekend relaxed. The woman had pushed her lightly tinted sunglasses to the top of her head. The man's sunglasses lay on the table beside his elbow. Through the window of the restaurant, Sue could see the couple's red sports car.
She had not liked the man and woman on sight, had not liked the condescending way in which they'd looked around the interior of the small take-out restaurant, as though they had been expecting waiters and banquet tables, had not liked the way they'd exchanged smug, derogatory glances over the contents of the menu.
She peeked at them over the top of the register. They were eating with chopsticks, and though they handled the utensils fairly well, it stir seemed phony to Sue, a pretentious affectation. She had never understood what made affluent white Americans want to use chopsticks--while eating Chinese food. These people used chopsticks at no other time, did not utilize the utensils when eating American food or Mexican food or while they were cooking, but they insisted on using them when they had Chinese food. Did it make them feel more ethnic, as though they were broadening tkeir cultural horizons? She didn't know.
She did know that while her parents and grandmother used chopsticks exclusively, she herself used either forks or chopsticks, depending on what was on the table Her brother John preferred forks and seldom used chopsticks at all.
The woman looked up, and Sue quickly returned her attention to the menus.
'Miss?' the woman called, raising a tan hand.
Sue stepped around the register and over to the table 'Could we have some more soy sauce?' The woman pronounced the word 'soy' in a strangely awkward glottal-stopped manner that was supposed to be authentic but resembled neither Mandarin nor Cantonese.
'Certainly,' Sue said. She hurried back into the kitchen and grabbed a handful of the small foil-wrapped packets of soy sauce from the. box next to the door. Her parents stopped their argument the instant she walked into the kitchen, her father moving over to the stove, her mother heading through the back door to the small room where her grandmother was chopping vegetables. '
She returned to the front of the restaurant. The man and woman ignored her as she placed the packets of soy sauce next to their plates.
Moving back behind the register, she once again began folding menus.
The kitchen was quiet now, the only noise her grandmother's music issuing from the cassette player. She stared down at the menus as she folded. Her parents had not resumed their argument, afraid that she would hear them. They always did this, trying to pretend in front of her and John that they always saw e),e-to-eye on evert thing that they were always in complete accord and never fought. Both she and her brother knew better, but they never said anything about it. Not to their parents.
Sometimes she wished that her family could hash out their problems in the open like a typical American family instead of keeping everything so secretive all the time. It would make things a lot easier in the long run.
The yuppies departed, leaving behind an inappropriately large tip. Sue cleared the table taking the plates back to the sink where her mother, grateful for something to do, had already started washing.
'Clean table,' her father told her bluntly in English. 'I always do,' she said.
She grabbed a wet cloth and wrapped it around her hand as she walked back out front. She looked up while she wiped the table and through the front window she saw John running up the street toward the restaurant. He jumped over the small ditch next to the parking lot and ran across the dirt. He pushed open the restaurant door, causing the attached bells to tinkle, and threw his books on the table nearest the entrance before heading into the kitchen to get something to drink.
'Friday,' he said. 'Finail),.'
She watched her brother without being obvious about it. He was out of breath, but he didn't appear frightened, and she relaxed a little. Last week, a couple of bullies from his junior high had threatened to beat him up, and he had run home in terror. This week, she supposed, the bullies had moved on to someone else.
He came back out a moment later, Dr. Pepper it hand 'What are they fighting about this time?' he asked, nod ding toward the kitchen.
Sue smiled. 'You could tell?' =,
Neither of them are talking.' i: ..
'Air-conditioning,' she said.
'Air-conditioning? Again?' John grinned and shook his head. 'Let's turn it down to fifty and open all the doors so the air gets out and drive them both crazy.' 'Knock it off,' she said, laughing. 'It'd be fun.'
She threw the washcloth at him. He caught it and tried to whip her with it, but she ran around the table
'You can't escape me!'
They ran behind, between, and around the restaurant's four tables, chasing each other, yelling, throwing the wash cloth, until their father came out of the kitchen and angrily told them to knock it off.
They stopped, and John glumly handed the washcloth to his father.
'Another fun Friday evening with the Wing family,' he said. '
Business was slow, and instead of waiting until after the restaurant closed to eat dinner the way they usually did, they ate early. Their father brought out a platter of chow fun around seven o'clock and set it on the largest table, telling Sue and John, who were both reading, to get plates, chopsticks and forks. They put away their books
